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Ebola gone, for now

Lt. Col. Neal Woollen of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases shows how to don and doff personal protective equipment with the help of Pfc. Kaiya Capuchino, a combat medic, in this 2014 photo. Photo by Air Force Staff Sgt. Chris Hubenthal

On Thursday, the World Health Organization declared the Ebola outbreak completely over. It came with a terrible cost to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone: “The Ebola epidemic claimed the lives of more than 11 300 people and infected over 28 500. The disease wrought devastation to families, communities and the health and economic systems of all 3 countries,” the agency reported.

Just over a year ago, the deadly Ebola virus was the talk of the United States. The virus played a big role in election-year politics as President Barack Obama hired an Ebola czar, politicians debating barring Africans who came more than 1,000 miles from the Ebola outbreak, and television news reported on the few cases in America itself.

Ebola is a particularly nasty virus, but panic is not a good treatment. After the infection rate plummeted, columnist Doyle McManus blamed fear-mongering politicians. The Palm Beach Post editorial board railed against the fear, saying a move in Florida “appears to be designed to rile up anti-immigration voters, an election-year pander-to-the-basest strategy pursued at the expense of a group of vulnerable children.”

Politifact named politicians’ and pundits’ misinformation its Lie of the Year for 2014, attacking them for claiming immigrants were spreading the disease, and it could be spread through even a sneeze.

A sample:

The U.S. must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our “borders.” Act fast!

While Ebola is a very serious disease that’s difficult to treat properly, it’s certainly possible. At one point, cases in a country were doubling every three weeks. The CDC warned of a phenomenally broad outbreak if things didn’t change: “Extrapolating trends to January 20, 2015, without additional interventions or changes in community behavior (e.g., notable reductions in unsafe burial practices), the model also estimates that Liberia and Sierra Leone will have approximately 550,000 Ebola cases (1.4 million when corrected for underreporting).”